Formation of the Holy Alliance
by AMarguerite
Summary: Bahorel meets his laughing mistress at a crazy, counter-culture bouzingo party, and negotiates a pleasant series of social contracts.


A pair of astonishingly broad shoulders appeared in Rosalie's line of sight. Rosalie tipsily re-adjusted her mask to get a better look at the newcomer. The owner of these amazing physical attributes had turned around to talk to someone behind him, but here was clearly a man who invested in good tailoring. The tight fit of his coat was enough to delight the heart of any grisette, whether or not she cared about the construction of the perfect M-notch collar. Rosalie had never been one for the current fashion of male beauty- a languishing look, a pale complexion, a slender figure and a head full of Romantic curls- she was still too much a peasant at heart. She was distracted from any conversation by the sight of a good pair of shoulders and she never looked twice at a man who didn't look as if he could lift her one-handed.

This one certainly looked as if he could.

Laure, who had been improvising a sort of shuffle step with Rosalie to a tune they called 'The Violinist is Visibly Drunk Right Now,' turned to follow Rosalie's obvious stare. She let out an impressed whistle. "There's a fine one for you, Rosalie."

"Lord love you, what a pair of shoulders!" Rosalie exclaimed. He had turned again and was now divesting himself of his coat, revealing a daring scarlet waistcoat. He had on a horned red mask over a nose that looked like it had been broken once or twice before, a strong jaw and shortish black hair. Rosalie was in immediate lust.

"There ain't exactly rules of introduction at one of these parties, is there?" asked Laure. She was a parlor maid most days (today was a Wednesday, her half-holiday and her night off) and often had to be reminded, via one or two skulls full of punch at a bouzingo party, that any rules of social interaction were arbitrary and fairly stupid. Rosalie prefered easily negotiated social contracts, it was a much more sensible way to go about things. "You could just go up and pretend to know him? That would be entirely permissible."

Rosalie snorted. "Laure, let's get another skull of punch, you're still on about work."

"Your hands might touch when leaning for the same skull," said Laure, melodramatically.

But on their way to the punchbowl and the skull cups (most of them were actually plaster and made by Rosalie's neighbor, a macabre young artisan), they became part of an impromptu re-staging of the Raft of the Medusa, had to avoid a drunk Napoleon trying to annex his neighbors, and had to pretend to be interested in at least three impromptu sonnets. Rosalie momentarily forgot about the newcomer. She was always easily distracted at bouzingo parties. That was the point of bouzingo parties, anyways, to enjoy a series of shocking impressions, to experience an inversion of the conventional bourgeois forms to alarm one's neighbors, and to utterly ignore any attempt at a linear progression to some end.

The punch was not as potent as one party Rosalie had heard of where the guess all passed out and had to be piled up in the basement, but everyone was about three sheets to the wind and listing about the first floor of the house wherever the zeitgeist blew them. Attempts by the Conservatory students at playing Romantic waltzes had disintegrated into the eclectic melody of 'I got stuck in the moving sixths' by the first violinist, 'what the hell happened to my bow,' by the second violinist, 'what are arms' by the viola player, and 'what is consciousness' by the cellist. This hadn't stopped the attempts at dancing and, while testing her sobriety, Rosalie enjoyed watching people in various costumes of any century but the present one swirling about. She had sewn a very nice Dresden shepherdess costume for Mademoiselle Duval's understudy at the Porte Saint-Martin and was trying to spot it.

"Don't understand why she wanted a shepherdess," said Laure, now on her fourth skull full of punch, her high-waisted, white muslin merveuilleuse costume slipping from one shoulder. "My mistress wanted to be one too. Dead boring, being a shepherdess, my brother married a shepherdess. Every single time they hire a clerk to write to me, she always says it must be so exciting to be a parlor maid."

"Is it?"

"No. But I take comfort in the fact that the young ladies of the house are always more bored than I am."

Rosalie shook her head. "That's the problem with the Neo-Platonic Great Chain of Being, it's a chain. Everyone's locked in it, rich and poor. There ain't any room for anyone to move freely, rich or poor. You ain't anything but what you were born into- a farm, a trade, a title. You ain't ever an individual, with your liberty ending only where another's beings. It's as Rousseau said, 'Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.'"

"How do you know all this social theory?" came a deep voice.

"M'father was a schoolmaster in Oise," said Rosalie, not terrifically interested in the interloper. "Ah ha! There it is! Look at that skirt, Laure, would you believe I found that printed muslin in the Temple for-"

Laure elbowed Rosalie in the side.

"Ow!"

Laure, eyes comically wide, gestured at the interloper with her skull cup, punch sloshing over the sides and onto the floor. Rosalie drew back before it could splatter the folds of her blue gown. It was a second hand, but barely worn silk gown from the Temple bazaar and Rosalie had taken great pains to tailor it to her voluptuous figure while still keeping the fashionable silhouette and large sleeves intact. Rosalie backed into what she almost immediately determined were a pair of pretty perfect pecs and a pair of equally well-muscled arms.

Rosalie tilted her head back and gave an appraising glance at the red mask above her own. Ah yes, it was the man she had been unsubtly ogling fifteen minutes ago. Bouzingo parties immediately became Rosalie's new favorite thing in the world. "Typically men ask me to dance before trying to pull me into their arms."

"Or do they instead negotiate a social contract?"

"That's all a dance is, if you think about it, the social contract of our time and society. Men have the power of choice, women have only the power of refusal. But," she said, with a grin, "you certainly won't be refused if you ask."

"That contract was easily negotiated," said broad-shoulders-and-good-tailoring. "I might as well declare my legal education at an end."

Rosalie repositioned herself and placed broad-shoulders-and-good-tailoring's hand on the small of her back. He had a good strong grip and Rosalie liked him for it. "Ah, a law student, are you?"

Her partner grimaced. "Not when I can help it."

"Oh I like you," said Rosalie, delighted. "I'm Rosalie."

He waited for her last name. Rosalie was not inclined to give it to him.

He shook his head. "Well then, oh mysterious lady of apparently no origins or family, I'll give you mine. I'm Bahorel."

That seemed like a good, solid name, a peasant name. "Have you any political leanings, since you've no profession?"

"Do you interrogate all your dance partners on their politics?"

"Only the ones I meet at bouzingo parties," replied Rosalie. "Stands to reason, half of them end up with everyone naked, you might as well get everything in the open."

"Well then, I'm from a peasant family in Gascony, so I've no fear of red. I leave that to horned cattle."

"And I suppose when you lose arguments, you like to punch your opponents," replied Rosalie, pleased to find herself in the arms of a Neo-Jacobin.

"That is an unfair stereotype against the Gascon people," said Bahorel, faux-indignant. "All the more unfair because it happens to be true."

Rosalie laughed. The more she learned about her partner the more she liked him. Bahorel was what she had always expected in a Gascon- brave, talkative (at times almost eloquent), bold to the verge of effrontery (in the midst of a mild quarrel about Condorcet, who Rosalie had grown up learning to venerate, and whom her partner thought too mild, he suddenly asked her opinion on free love) and a wholesale bruiser and blusterer. Bahorel freely admitted he loved nothing more than a quarrel (though he and Rosalie soon found that she laughed to humiliate her opponents into silence and he prefered just to punch them unconscious, a difference of tactics Rosalie feared might have been a deal-breaker). He amended this to say that he did, in fact, love a fight more than a quarrel and loved nothing so much as a fight unless it was a revolt. He had attended a boarding school in Paris and participated in the 1822 revolt over a student's death, and liked Romanticism for its glory in the violent destruction of all that came before. Rosalie was dazzled by her good fortune.

"It is midnight!" cried the party's host.

It wasn't.

By Rosalie's estimation it was half-past ten.

However, bouzingos were not inclined to be governed by something as trivial as _time_. They all unmasked, Rosalie reaching her hands up from her partner's shoulders to untangle the ribbons of his mask, and Bahorel, following her lead, very easily sliding her mask off one-handed. Rosalie liked what she saw. Her idea of beauty wasn't particularly fashionable, but Bahorel fit it. And, judging by his sudden grin, she fit his idea of beauty as well.

"No, stop, stop," said the host, as one of the violinists began to strip. "There's card tables in the other room, we have to do things properly! It's not a masquerade unless there's dancing and gambling."

"It's not a bouzingo party if everyone's fully clothed," protested someone in the crowd.

The host had been raised in a conventionally bourgeois family before embracing his current bohemian lifestyle. On his unmasked face one could see the struggle between his chosen ideology and his inculcated desire for good form. But the conflict resolved itself easily enough when he blurted out, "Well- then we gamble for each other's clothes. No other stakes!"

"I challenge you to a game, then, Rosalie," Bahorel said promptly. "I've been feeling your sash for the past half-hour and now have a great desire to own it."

"Why, because it's red?" asked Rosalie, laughing. "That must've been why you chased after me to begin with." She waved his red bull's mask at him. "Ole!"

"Red suits my complexion," he replied, with a delightful grin. "Or are you afraid to lose?"

"Oh no," said Rosalie, drawn to the idea of a fierce game full of quarrels and challenges. "Only afraid to see how quickly I'll strip you. You wouldn't think it to look at me, but I've a devilish good head for numbers."

And by this Rosalie meant that she cheated spectacularly at vignt-et-un. She could perfectly count cards while heatedly debating universal suffrage, social contract theory and the causes of the Terror. Rosalie's father had been a clerk to an old Girondist regicide during the Revolution, before the Napoleonic take-over caused her father's unexpected loss of position, and consumption caused an unexpected loss of family. He had no better audience than his only remaining child, whom he educated so that he might have someone with whom to debate politics. Rosalie was adept at multitasking while quarreling over the finer points of the natural frontier theory of revolutionary France's borders; if she hadn't been, nothing would ever have gotten done at home.

It delighted Rosalie to show off the skill she most valued in herself, and, she had to admit, it greatly pleased her to accumulate, in very short order, Bahorel's boots, cravat, and waistcoat. Laure had briefly played vingt-et-un with them, but, as her merveuilluse costume consisted entirely of a gown, stockings and shoes, she was unable to play past three rounds. Not that she had wanted to continue- an incroyable had then gallantly offered her his coat, and Laure had gallantly offered to engage him in a naked race around the courtyard garden instead. This seemed to suit both of their predilections admirably, and Rosalie was left to quarrel with Bahorel over basic mathematics and advanced political theory.

"I see I should never have challenged you," Bahorel allowed, after a five minute quarrel on how to add to twenty-one. He looked at her hand in a faux-indignant manner. "That is, indeed, twenty-one. What now?"

"Let's have the shirt," said Rosalie. Bahorel grumbled, but pulled it over his head and handed it across the table. Rosalie fanned herself with her cards. The shirt had been a good choice. Bahorel had a wonderful, well-muscled chest. "Shall we continue?"

"I have one rule for bouzingo parties," said Bahorel, "and that is in regard to trouser removal. I refuse to take them off in public."

"In private, then?"

Bahorel had a delightfully wicked grin. "That can be negotiated."

Rosalie liked where this was going. "Well then," she said, gathering up his clothes. "Rousseau may disagree, but I say we carry the debate over to the private sphere. I know there's three or four bedrooms upstairs."

"I admire plain talk in a woman," said Bahorel.

"I admire good pecs in a man," replied Rosalie, unabashed. And, still in too competitive a mood to immediately make use of a bed and a room with a locked door, she insisted on playing out the game until Bahorel was naked before her, and his clothes in a chaotic heap by her side.

"One more round?" asked Bahorel.

"You haven't anything left to lose!" exclaimed Rosalie, admiring the view.

"You , however, are still fully clothed," Bahorel pointed out. And, much to Rosalie's feigned vexation, she wagered everything and lost. It surprised her that cheating to lose was harder than cheating to win (her instincts rebelled when she took a hit she knew she didn't need), but when she went bust and saw Bahorel's triumphant smile, she couldn't keep up the act for long.

"I'll take that sash now," said Bahorel, flinging the cards to the side.

Rosalie had been sitting cross-legged on the floor with him and now stretched out her leg. "Eh, you'd be better off with the garter. It's also red, but I think would suit you much better. I can't quite see you wearing a sash with roses."

Bahorel admiringly ran a hand up her leg, and stopped at her knee, raising his eyebrows at her. "I am nearing a natural frontier."

Rosalie snorted. "Passport granted by the republic of Rosalie. Citizen, you are free to enter."

"This might be the most fun I've had with bedroom talk," said Bahorel, crossing the border.

"I am forced to agree," said Rosalie, enjoying the feel of his broad, calloused hand as he slid her stocking down her calf. "Clearly we will have to renegotiate terms to include future diplomatic missions."

Bahorel laughed, a low, rumbling sound that delighted Rosalie utterly. "Far be it from me to reject the general will."


End file.
